When augmented reality hits the Internet of Things

Wired.co.uk contributor Anna Leach examines how augmented reality and The Internet of Things could impact each other in the coming years.

Both the Internet of Things and augmented reality (AR) are hotly tipped computing trends and both are in their infancy. Where they intersect could be an engrossing area -- with the visual and location-based aspect of augmented reality providing a real-time, real-place interface for the data being pumped out by objects. We’d be able to see not just whether a bus is behind a building but how many people are on it, whether it’s on time, where people are sitting on the bus, what the name of driver is and well, any other information you decided to put out there.

AR has often been hailed as Terminator vision technology, after the Schwarzenegger film, but with the current state of AR which relies on people to upload points of interest -- the information Arnie could see through his enhanced visor would be what Joe down the road is tweeting, some information about local property prices and where to get a latte.

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Currently AR is interesting, yes, but slightly random and patchy. With AR plus the Internet of Things, he could check out different temperatures in different parts of a building, track any given object or person and see or hear what was going on behind walls -- provided the right chips and sensors were in place.

Howard Ogden is an augmented reality developer who works on Layar, creating flagship apps such as the Beatles AR one, and is head of his own AR company mobilistar -- he’s cautiously optimistic about the potential of the Internet of Things for augmented reality:

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“The tidal wave of metadata streaming from the Internet of Things will provide many opportunities and some challenges -- one of which is representing it in a relevant and understandable fashion,” he says. “Augmented reality, and in particular mobile AR, is being touted as the ideal channel through which to achieve that -- and I agree. The [web] certainly can be used to visualise this data. AR can help not just to visualise it -- but see it in context.”

Context is the keyword there.

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Howard gives an example of when that window into real-place, real-time data could be crucial: “It’s my belief that the emergency services will be amongst the first to create the next generation of AR + Internet of Things applications -- one reason being that they can access much of the metadata without privacy problems, but more than that. Imagine, firefighters using AR visors that display building schematics, evacuation procedures, and environmental data (O2 levels / temperature) during an emergency.”

The limitations of AR as an interface for the Internet of Things However, we’re not all firefighters and we won’t always need data that quickly. Nicolas Nov, a member of the Council for the Internet of Things and founder of research agency LiftLab, points out several examples of when it would be much better all round to get the information wired to your computer and presented to you as a graph on the web a week later.

Take a pedometer, say. You don’t want to know every time you take a step on a run that you’ve just taken a step, but a week later you would like to see an aggregate of many steps you took each day, plotted on a graph perhaps next to daily calorie intake.

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Nova’s understanding of the Internet of Things is that it is the services built on top of the object data that are the important elements: “The information and services based on these objects need to be perceived and understood by human users, which necessarily leads to various sort of interfaces... and augmented reality is one of them.”

The possibilitiesBut using augmented reality as an interface for the Internet of Things has many advantages. As an immediate and visual medium it can display a lot of data clearly and quickly -- a string of temperature readings could be displayed as changing coloured patches on an image for example. It will allow us to engage much more deeply with what’s around us. Scanning down a street we could see which restaurants are full, which have seats, which shops have that game/coat we want in stock or where our friends are. Other applications for this engaging technology are likely to be games, or maybe training exercises because it’s engrossing and fast-moving.

Of course this will improve when AR improves: location needs to get more accurate and there need to be more intuitive AR-capable devices.

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One final interesting use for AR here is that it will be a window on the new datasphere in which we’ll be living. Nicolas Nova says: “The ‘augmentation’ metaphor is interesting to depict what Mike Kuniavsky names ‘information shadows’”.

And in Kuniavsky’s words, that’s when we “import physical objects into the datasphere, to endow them with an informational shadow. Nearly all industrially created objects have rich information shadows, even if those shadows are invisible to their owners and users.”

With AR and the Internet of Things, those shadows would be visible. While that’s currently just a tool for the curious, fascinating things could be built with the information it opens up.